The Story Of A Play
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The Story Of A Play

William Dean Howells

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eBook - ePub

The Story Of A Play

William Dean Howells

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About This Book

'The Story of a Play' is a pleasing addition to the list of the charming trivialities to which Mr. Howells has chiefly devoted himself in the late years of the 19th century. It now seems a confirmed habit with him to select for treatment some closely circumscribed phase of experience, to make it the subject of the most searching and minute observation, and to develop its utmost possibilities. This intensive method of literary cultivation is the method best calculated to yield artistic results; and, if this work of Mr. Howells does sometimes suggest the carving of cherry-stones, the carving is very neatly done. Few subjects are more hackneyed than that of the budding man of letters seeking to make his way in an unappreciative world, and it requires some daring to bring it once more into service. In the present case, the aspirant for fame pins his fortunes to play- writing, which gives the author an opportunity to introduce the chief types of player-folk into his pages, and to illuminate their ways with many a flash of gentle humor. By making the wife of the hero collaborate in the work of writing the play, Mr. Howells is enabled to add to his collection another of those examples of femininity that usually prove so exasperating to the sex that they assume to represent. It is all very well by way of semi satirical pastime, but women are sometimes rational beings, the score or more of Mr. Howells's novels to the contrary notwithstanding.

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Year
2020
ISBN
9783849657666

III.

For the present in her resentment of his willingness to abase his genius before Godolphin, or even to hold it in abeyance, Mrs. Maxwell would not walk to supper with her husband in the usual way, touching his shoulder with hers from time to time, and making herself seem a little lower in stature by taking the downward slope of the path leading from their cottage to the hotel. But the necessity of appearing before the people at their table on as perfect terms with him as ever had the effect that conduct often has on feeling, and she took his arm in going back to their cottage, and leaned tenderly upon him.
Their cottage was one of the farthest from the hotel, and the smallest and quietest. In fact there was yet no one in it but themselves, and they dwelt there in an image of home, with the sole use of the veranda and the parlor, where Maxwell had his manuscripts spread about on the table as if he owned the place. A chambermaid came over from the hotel in the morning to put the cottage in order, and then they could be quite alone there for the rest of the day.
"Shall I light the lamp for you, Brice?" his wife asked, as they mounted the veranda steps.
"No," he said, "let us sit out here," and they took the arm-chairs that stood on the porch, and swung to and fro in silence for a little while. The sea came and went among the rocks below, marking its course in the deepening twilight with a white rope of foam, and raving huskily to itself, with now and then the long plunge of some heavier surge against the bowlders, and a hoarse shout. The Portland boat swam by in the offing, a glitter of irregular lights, and the lamps on the different points of the Cape blinked as they revolved in their towers. "This is the kind of thing you can get only in a novel," said Maxwell, musingly. "You couldn't possibly give the feeling of it in a play."
"Couldn't you give the feeling of the people looking at it?" suggested his wife, and she put out her hand to lay it on his.
"Yes, you could do that," he assented, with pleasure in her notion; "and that would be better. I suppose that is what would be aimed at in a description of the scene, which would be tiresome if it didn't give the feeling of the spectator."
"And Godolphin would say that if you let the carpenter have something to do he would give the scene itself, and you could have the effect of it at first hand."
Maxwell laughed. "I wonder how much they believe in those contrivances of the carpenter themselves. They have really so little to do with the dramatic intention; but they have been multiplied so since the stage began to make the plays that the actors are always wanting them in. I believe the time will come when the dramatist will avoid the occasion or the pretext for them."
"That will be after Godolphin's time," said Mrs. Maxwell.
"Well, I don't know," returned Maxwell. "If Godolphin should happen to imagine doing without them he would go all lengths."
"Or if you imagined it and let him suppose he had. He never imagines anything of himself."
"No, he doesn't. And yet how perfectly he grasps the notion of the thing when it is done! It is very different from literature, acting is. And yet literature is only the representation of life."
"Well, acting is the representation of life at second-hand, then, and it ought to be willing to subordinate itself. What I can't bear in Godolphin is his setting himself up to be your artistic equal. He is no more an artist than the canvas is that the artist paints a picture on."
Maxwell laughed. "Don't tell him so; he won't like it."
"I will tell him so some day, whether he likes it or not."
"No, you mustn't; for it isn't true. He's just as much an artist in his way as I am in mine, and, so far as the public is concerned, he has given more proofs."
"Oh, his public!"
"It won't do to despise any public, even the theatre-going public." Maxwell added the last words with a faint sigh.
"It's always second-rate," said his wife, passionately. "Third-rate, fourth-rate! Godolphin was quite right about that. I wish you were writing a novel, Brice, instead of a play. Then you would be really addressing refined people."
"It kills me to have you say that, Louise."
"Well, I won't. But don't you see, then, that you must stand up for art all the more unflinchingly if you intend to write plays that will refine the theatre-going public, or create a new one? That is why I can't endure to have you even seem to give way to Godolphin."
"You must stand it so long as I only seem to do it. He's far more manageable than I expected him to be. It's quite pathetic how docile he is, how perfectly ductile! But it won't do to browbeat him when he comes over here a little out of shape. He's a curious creature," Maxwell went on with a relish in Godolphin, as material, which his wife suffered with difficulty. "I wonder if he could ever be got into a play. If he could he would like nothing better than to play himself, and he would do it to perfection; only it would be a comic part, and Godolphin's mind is for the serious drama." Maxwell laughed. "All his artistic instincts are in solution, and it needs something like a chemical agent to precipitate them, or to give them any positive character. He's like a woman!"
"Thank you," said Mrs. Maxwell.
"Oh, I mean all sorts of good things by that. He has the sensitiveness of a woman."
"Is that a good thing? Then I suppose he was so piqued by what I said about his skirt-dance that he will renounce you."
"Oh, I don't believe he will. I managed to smooth him up after you went out."
Mrs. Maxwell sighed. "Yes, you are very patient, and if you are patient, you are good. You are better than I am."
"I don't see the sequence exactly," said Maxwell.
They were both silent, and she seemed to have followed his devious thought in the same muse, for when he spoke again she did not reproach him with an equal inconsequence. "I don't know whether I could write a novel, and, besides, I think the drama is the supreme literary form. It stands on its own feet. It doesn't have to be pushed along, or pulled along, as the novel does."
"Yes, of course, it's grand. That's the reason I can't bear to have you do anything unworthy of it."
"I know, Louise," he said, tenderly, and then again they did not speak for a little while.
He emerged from their silence, at a point apparently very remote, with a sigh. "If I could only know just what the feelings of a murderer really were for five minutes, I could out-Shakespeare Shakespeare in that play. But I shall have to trust to the fall of man, and the general depravity of human nature, I suppose. After all, there's the potentiality of every kind of man in every man. If you've known what it is to hate, you've known what it is to kill."
"I felt once as if I had killed you," she said, and then he knew that she was thinking of a phase of their love which had a perpetual fascination for them both. "But I never hated you."
"No; I did the hating," he returned, lightly.
"Ah, don't say so, dear," she entreated, half in earnest.
"Well, have it all to yourself, then," he said; and he rose and went indoors, and lighted the lamp, and she saw him get out the manuscript of his play, while she sat still, recalling the time when she had tried to dismiss him from her thoughts upon a theory of his unworthiness. He had not yet spoken of love to her then, but she felt as if she had refused to listen to him, and her remorse kept his image before her in an attitude of pathetic entreaty for at least a hearing. She knew that she had given him reason, if she had not given him courage, to believe that she cared for him; but he was too proud to renew the tacit approaches from which she had so abruptly retreated, and she had to invite them from him.
When she began to do this with the arts so imperceptible to the single-mindedness of a man, she was not yet sure whether she could endure to live with him or not; she was merely sure that she could not live without him, or, to be more specific, without his genius, which she believed no one else appreciated as she did. She believed that she understood his character better than any one else, and would know how to supplement it with her own. She had no ambition herself, but she could lend him a more telescopic vision in his, and keep his aims high, if his self-concentration ever made him short-sighted. He would write plays because he could not help it, but she would inspire him to write them with the lofty sense of duty she would have felt in writing them if she had his gifts.
She was as happy in their engagement and as unhappy as girls usually are during their courtship. It is the convention to regard those days as very joyous, but probably no woman who was honest about the fact would say that they were so from her own experience. Louise found them full of excitement and an interest from which she relaxed at times with such a sense of having strained forward to their end that she had a cold reluctance from Maxwell, and though she never dreamed of giving him up again, she sometimes wished she had never seen him. She was eager to have it all over, and be married and out of the way, for one thing because she knew that Maxwell could never be assimilated to her circumstance, and she should have no rest till she was assimilated to his. When it came to the dinners and lunches, which the Hilary kinship and friendship made in honor of her engagement, she found that Maxwell actually thought she could make excuse of his work to go without him, and she had to be painfully explicit before she could persuade him that this would not do at all. He was not timid about meeting her friends, as he might very well have been; but, in comparison with his work, he apparently held them of little moment, and at last he yielded to her wishes rather than her reasons. He made no pretence of liking those people, but he gave them no more offence than might have been expected. Among the Hilary cousins there were several clever women, who enjoyed the quality of Maxwell's somewhat cold, sarcastic humor, and there were several men who recognized his ability, though none of them liked him any better than he liked them. He had a way of regarding them all at first as of no interest, and then, if something kindled his imagination from them, of showing a sudden technical curiosity, which made the ladies, at least, feel as if he were dealing with them as so much material. They professed to think that it was only a question of time when they should all reappear in dramatic form, unless Louise should detect them in the manuscript before they were put upon the stage and forbid his using them. If it were to be done before marriage they were not sure that she would do it, or could do it, for it was plain to be seen that she was perfectly infatuated with him. The faults they found in him were those of manner mostly, and they perceived...

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